Landscapes Lost and Found - Agri-culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature - page 24

The naming of the new, which was actually old, with the old from
elsewhere continued apace for decades, as explorers forced their way into
the interior, aiming, as Carter put it, to 'dignify even hints of the habitable with
significant names. . . Possession of the country depended. . . to some extent, on civilizing
the landscape, bringing it into orderly being' . The new story is told and written,
and the old slips away without notice. At the time, few bothered to find
out about the local stories of landscape, of the song lines stretching across
both thousands of years and thousands of kilometres. Song lines wrap
nature and the landscape inextricably into culture, identity and com-
munity. Take one away, and the whole falls apart.
Today, 229 years after Cook's landfall, I am standing with Phil and
Suzie Grice on their Western Australian wool and cereal farm. They have
an ecologically literate view of the landscape. They had seen what
happened through modern farming, and where it had led their family and
neighbours. In a brief two centuries, modern farming and land manage-
ment methods brought substantial economic benefit, but great harm, too,
to the environment and land. Phil says: 'For two generations, the previous owner
and his father pushed back the frontier, removing nature and replacing it with fields. Now,
I'm replanting native vegetation as fast as I can and afford'. The farm is in Lower
Balgarup catchment, 260 kilometres south-west of Perth, set in a land-
scape of ancient and deeply weathered soils. But in the blink of an eye,
it has changed. In the 40 years to 1990, 85 per cent of all the natural
vegetation in the catchment was removed, with a profound impact on both
hydrology and local biodiversity. Soils and water have become salinized,
and farming itself threatened. The cost of expansion of the farming
frontier has been destruction of the very resource upon which farmers
relied. 52
Eighteen farmers set up the Lower Balgarup catchment group in 1990,
covering an area of some 14,000 hectares. It is one of 400 Landcare
groups in Western Australia. One of the first actions of the group was
to survey the area of land degradation because no one quite knew the
extent of the problem. They were shocked to find more than 600 hectares
of land affected by dryland salinity and waterlogging. Since then, Phil and
his neighbours have planted 200,000 trees, constructed 100 kilometres
of new fencing to protect creeks, and another 70 kilometres of drains and
banks, and put down land to perennial grasses. The trees and grasses help
to pump groundwater by evapotranspiration, so reducing salinity. But the
task for the whole landscape is still massive. There are 19 million hectares
of wheat and wool country in Western Australia, and already nearly 2
million hectares have been lost to dryland salinity. By 2010, another 3
million hectares are expected to have been lost and 40 rural towns in the
wheat belt will have become vulnerable. This ancient landscape, where the